Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela: Inspiration from afar

They met just once. But Barack Obama looked to Nelson Mandela for inspiration for more than three decades, from a California campus to inner-city Chicago to the White House.

Mandela’s influence stirred Obama to get involved in the fight against apartheid at Occidental College and guided the future president from community organizing to politics, as he sought to affect tangible, lasting change.

“My first political action, the first thing I ever did that involved an issue or a policy or politics was a protest against apartheid,” he recalled. “I would study his words and his writings. The day he was released from prison gave me a sense of what human beings can do when they’re guided by their hopes and not by their fears. And like so many around the globe, I cannot fully imagine my own life without the example that Nelson Mandela set.”

“And so long as I live, I will do what I can to learn from him.”

Most of Obama’s inspiration happened from afar. Mandela’s career was near its end, and Obama’s ascent just beginning, when the two met in Washington in 2005. But the moment made an impression on the former South African president, who kept a photo signed by the future U.S. president on his desk even before Obama made it to theWhite House.

After Obama won in 2008, Mandela reveled in a vision fulfilled, writing to the president-elect that his “victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.”

But Obama’s election coincided with the decline in Mandela’s health, and the two men were never able to build the kind of relationship they both might have hoped for.

“Mandela had been out of public view, pretty incapacitated and enfeebled for the last few years, so they never had the kind of relationship that evolved during the Clinton administration,” said Stephen Morrison, a former Clinton Africa policy expert who is now a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The relationship is of a generational impact that Mandela had on people like President Obama in a very formative period” in the 1980s and 1990s.

For the president, the admiration dates back to his years at Occidental, after he learned about the anti-apartheid movement and Mandela’s key role, which had already left him imprisoned on Robben Island for close to two decades. It upset him, Obama said while in South Africa this summer, to know that “brave people” were jailed for fighting for freedom while “my own government in the United States was not standing on their side.” And it motivated him to act, as he got involved with the divestment movement on his campus.

His first public speech — a key moment in his first memoir, “Dreams from My Father” — came at a 1981 divestment protest. It lasted only two minutes, and Obama wasn’t thrilled with how it went, but it put him on a track that would lead him first to the South Side of Chicago and, eventually, to a career in politics.

The president was also inspired by an August 2006 visit to Robben Island, the prison where Mandela spent nearly two decades of his term behind bars. When Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he compared his accomplishments to a range of previous winners, including Mandela, and said that, by comparison, “my accomplishments are slight.”

Though Obama made only a brief stop in sub-Saharan Africa during his first term, the rest of the Obama family — the first lady, her mother, and Malia and Sasha — visited Mandela at his home in June 2011. Mandela and the first lady sat together on a couch for about 20 minutes during that visit, and he signed an advance copy of his book, “Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorized Quotations Book,” for the first family.

As Mandela’s health suffered this year, Obama sent his well-wishes from afar. “When you think of a single individual that embodies the kind of leadership qualities that I think we all aspire to, the first name that comes up is Nelson Mandela. And so we wish him all the very best,” he said in March, when a group of African leaders visited the White House.

Mandela’s health was particularly precarious as the White House prepared for Obama’s June trip to South Africa, including possible contingencies in case the president needed to move his keynote speech of the trip or attend Mandela’s funeral.

Instead, Mandela’s health stayed steady, as the South African government reported him to be in serious but stable condition. Obama was able to meet with Mandela’s family in Johannesburg and talk to Mandela’s wife by phone, as she stayed at her husband’s hospital bedside in Pretoria.

But, abiding by the Mandela family’s wishes, the president didn’t get to have his second meeting with the man often called Madiba, his tribal name.

After visiting with other family members during his visit to South Africa, Obama said he “expressed my hope that Madiba draws peace and comfort from the time that he is spending with loved ones.”

“I also reaffirmed the profound impact that his legacy has had in building a free South Africa, and in inspiring people around the world — including me. That’s a legacy that we must all honor in our own lives,” he added.

Just last month, Obama hosted a White House screening of “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” a film based on Mandela’s autobiography. At the U.S. premiere of the movie, Idris Elba, the actor who plays Mandela, told USA Today that he “really felt proud to take the film to [Obama], because I know how fond he is of Mr. Mandela.”

Obama has resisted drawing comparisons between himself and Mandela, but has certainly looked to the former South African president for guidance on leadership.

“The conciliation, the belief in good will and good faith and extending one’s hand to one’s enemy and negotiating with one’s enemy, there’s a clear connection between Obama and Mandela,” Morrison said. The president’s “style of mediation and the power of turning things around through a very clever set of negotiations” are clearly drawn from Mandela, he said.

Rick Stengel, the ghostwriter of Mandela’s autobiography and former managing editor of Time magazine who joined the Obama State Department earlier this year, also saw undeniable links between the two men that he discussed in his 2010 book “Mandela’s Way.”

“Obama’s self-discipline, his willingness to listen and to share credit, his inclusion of his rivals in his administration, and his belief that people want things explained, all seem like a 21st century version of Mandela’s values and persona,” Stengel wrote. “While Mandela’s worldview was forged in the cauldron of racial politics, Obama is creating a post-racial political model. Whatever Mandela may or may not think of the new American president, Obama is in many ways his true successor on the world stage.”